5 tips to boost your business’ local SEO

Jason Walker

Search Engine Optimisation

Posted on 11th April 2016 at 14:32.

Is your business optimised for your local market? If not, then it definitely should be. The customers on your door step are the one who are most likely to do business with you. The only catch that there might be is that these customers need to know you’re there in the first place. Most searches on Google are local searches. Naturally customers looking to spend their money on goods or services normally would automatically look within the area they live in first.

Therefore it makes sense to publicise your website and make sure that every customer in the local area not only knows you are there, but that you also offer the best product at the most competitive price. But how do you best optimise a site for the local market, and how can you increase local search engine rankings? Well, you start by following these 5 basic steps.

Get listed on Google

This is probably the most basic of tasks, but surprisingly many businesses fail to do this. So get your business listed locally on Google as soon as possible. Why is this so important? Well, believe it or not Google doesn’t just exist for the benefit of larger corporations: it wants your local business to be discovered too. Google wants to provide the best possible service to its users, and for that it needs to be able to give users details of every relevant business.

Getting listed isn’t difficult and will only take a few minutes. Just remember to get your business listed in the right business category. Why? Well, you want to get listed in the good, high quality online directories that are used by your industry. This type of directory will help your search engine ranking.

Choose appropriate title tags

If you want to make a big impact on local search rankings for minimal effort, then make sure you choose the appropriate title tags. In other words, when you fill out your web pages make sure the information you include is optimised for the local market. Why’s this important? Well, simply because Google doesn’t rank sites; it ranks individual pages. So it’s therefore important to optimise each page for local SEO to make an impact on organic search results. What’s the best way of doing this? Well, according to Moz, the best format to use is Primary Keyword+ Secondary Keyword+ Brand Name.

Take advantage of Google+

If you want to obtain better local search engine rankings then make sure you set up a Google+ business page and maintain an active presence. Why’s this important? Well, activity on Google+ pages is measured differently from other social media platforms, possibly because Google + is owned by Google. It’s understandable therefore that Google might well prefer to favour its own.

Whatever the reason, the important thing to remember is that Google+ works well because it has been designed specifically for SEO. When you post on Google+ do it in a similar way to Facebook, and encourage your customers to offer reviews as well, as reviews are powerful ammunition for search engine rankings.

Location pages

Be sure to build specifically geo-targeted location pages for the top locations your business serves. By doing this you’ll increase your rank for specific locations over time. Doing this will increase your rank for specific locations over time. On these pages make sure you add the actual location in the URL, in the title tag and be sure to use the city/town name a few times on the page itself. There’s no limit to the number of location pages you can add, but it’s probably best if you build pages for your main target areas and focus solely on these.

Name, address and phone number

Always include your name, address and phone number on your homepage, and put this information somewhere where it is highly visible. The same applies to mobile pages too. While you’re at it, also place a Google map on your page so that customers can easily navigate to your business form their location. The purpose of including this information is so that the customer always has the right information to hand when checking out your business online. Should they need to call you, the information is there for them to use.

As we mentioned in our previous blog, we’ve recently undertaken a 360° virtual tour of our offices here at Ourworx. This is on our Google My Business Page. It seems…

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